trump is serious!!!!!

[MajGenl.Meade]

Madonna?

[Lord Jim]

I opened his post out of curiosity when you said:

...already had one extremely awful consequence. There it is, right below LJ's post and right above this one.

It's a YouTube clip of Madonna doing her horrendous rendition of Evita...

Oh, wait a minute...

the "extremely awful consequence" you were referring to was wes posting here again...

[wesw]

all thanks to your advice, jim....

....about the needing to stand alone at times?

thanks!

don t worry, I ll stick to politics from now on.

I won t bother with the niceties and the minutia and the joys of life.

those things are best discussed among friends.

objectively, if you are honest, you will have to admit that my insights into this campaign have been far and away the most accurate on this board.

but I m just a simple fisherman, what do I know?

[Scooter]

he will win 50 states and 50% of the black vote in the general election

[wesw]

going once...., going twice....

ok scooter...., since you ve mentioned it twice, and my curiousity has gotten the better of me, I ll finally bite....

when did I "vow to run you off the board" ?

would you be kind enough to direct me to the thread?

I don t recall saying that.

[Scooter]

[Bicycle Bill]

Eighteen comments already posted in this thread today —
and nine of them, complete with video clips, are from our prodigal Trumpketeer.

H E ' S    B A - A C K ! !

-"BB"-

[oldr_n_wsr]

my insights into this campaign have been far and away the most accurate on this board

I guess Hillary is out?
Oh wait, she's not.
And my bet was hillary would be done on the tuesday after the first monday in november.

[wesw]

oldr....

meade is still in the running to win the pool for Hillarity s withdrawal date.

he picked the latest date and therefore can still win if she withdraws before election day.....

even if she is forced to withdraw before inauguration day......, meade wins...

he is the only possible winner of the Giant Pot Cookie....

(which is long since gone....., sorry meade, I had the munchies....)

[Sue U]

Re-posting from a thread Scooter started a couple of days ago (with no replies).

Basically, there are 32 states that will reliably go either Democrat (19) or Republican (13). The race will really be fought and won by Hillary in just a few states -- and perhaps only one -- with high electoral vote value. For Trump, he would need to clean up in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado AND Florida to have a chance of winning, as well as holding on to states like Missouri and Arizona that are at least competitive. It will be a lot easier for Hillary to pick up Florida -- or take Ohio plus Virginia -- for the win.

Republicans have a massive electoral map problem that has nothing to do with Donald Trump

By Chris Cillizza May 2 at 3:19 PM

Politico reported today on a Florida poll conducted for a business group in the state that shows Hillary Clinton beating Donald Trump by 13 points and Ted Cruz by nine.

Why is that important? Because if Clinton wins Florida and carries the 19 states (plus D.C.) that have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in each of the last six elections, she will be the 45th president. It's that simple.

Here's what that map would look like:



And here's the underlying math. If Clinton wins the 19 states (and D.C.) that every Democratic nominee has won from 1992 to 2012, she has 242 electoral votes. Add Florida's 29 and you get 271. Game over.

The Republican map — whether with Trump, Cruz or the ideal Republican nominee (Paul Ryan?) as the standard-bearer — is decidedly less friendly. There are 13 states that have gone for the GOP presidential nominee in each of the last six elections. But they only total 102 electorate votes. That means the eventual nominee has to find, at least, 168 more electoral votes to get to 270. Which is a hell of a lot harder than finding 28 electoral votes.

Many Republicans — particularly in Washington — are already preparing to blame a loss this fall, which many of them view as inevitable, on the divisiveness of Trump. That's not entirely fair to Trump though.

While his dismal numbers among women and Hispanics, to name two groups, don't help matters and could — in a worst-case scenario — put states like Arizona and even Utah in play for Democrats, the map problems that face the GOP have very, very little to do with Trump or even Cruz.

Instead they are, largely, demographic problems centered on the GOP's inability to win any large swath of non-white voters. New Mexico, a state in which almost half the population is Latino, is the ur-example here. In 2004, George W. Bush won the Land of Enchantment in his bid for a second term. (His margin over John Kerry was 588 votes.) Eight years later, Barack Obama won the state by 10 points over Mitt Romney; neither side targeted it in any meaningful way.

What has become increasingly clear is that any state with a large or growing non-white population has become more and more difficult for Republicans to win. Virginia and North Carolina, long Republican strongholds, have moved closer and closer to Democrats of late. (Obama won both states in 2008 and carried Virginia in 2012.)

At the same time as these states have grown friendlier to Democrats, there are very few states that are growing increasingly Republican. Wisconsin and Minnesota are two but neither is moving rapidly in Republicans' favor just yet.

What you are left with then is an electoral map in which the Democratic nominee begins at a significant advantage over the Republican one. (It is the obverse of the massive Republican electoral college edge of the 1980s.) And that edge is totally distinct from any individual candidate and his/her strengths or weaknesses. Yes, Trump as the nominee is more problematic than Ryan as the nominee, but the idea that Ryan would start the general election with a coin-flip chance of being elected president is just wrong.

The Republican map problem goes deeper than Trump — or any one candidate. Blaming Trump for a loss this November not only misses the point but could ensure that Republicans are doomed to repeat history in 2020.

[Long Run]

OTOH, as Howard Fineman writes on HuffPo:

The Numbers. Shockingly – given his outrageous, race-baiting and even violence-tinged rhetoric – Trump is not that far behind in the horse race as the “fall” campaign informally begins.

Nor does the Electoral College map look that impossible for him. With the possible exception of Arizona, there are few, if any, red states from 2012 that he would likely lose.

There are also at least five large blue states in which he could compete, especially for the votes of those former Reagan Democrats. Those states are Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and, yes, Pennsylvania.

Together, they represent more than enough electoral votes to send Trump to the White House.

Unless Fineman is just drumming up business or trying to keep liberals from getting too confident, there is a campaign to come in a season that has been unpredictable. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/don ... cb0451202?

[Scooter]

Unless Fineman is just drumming up business or trying to keep liberals from getting too confident

Could well be either, because I'm not aware of any campaign in history where a map like this:



has turned upside by election day. (note that Dave Leip maintained the historical party colours and did not make the switch to R=Red, D=Blue with everyone else)

[Scooter]

[Long Run]

Didn't the first Bush trail Dukakis by double digits in the summer and won easily in the fall? I'm sure there are other elections where a candidate made up the ground that Trump needs (Rasmussen already has Trump in the lead but his polls are alone with this finding). Of course, none of them had the negatives of Trump.

So, according to the map, there are 162 electoral votes solid or leaning toward Trump. There are 207 solid for Clinton. There are 109 that are leaning to Clinton now, but many of those are close or even within the margin of error (e.g., the last Ohio poll I saw was 3%). And there are 60 toss-up votes. Is it that far out the realm of possibility that with a mediocre candidate like Clinton, who has her own historic negatives, with the media continuing to cover Trump's every utterance because it makes them money, and an electorate that apparently votes in large part on the celebrity of a candidate, that Trump could figure out how to make up those few percentage points in the states that count?

I hope the election plays out like the experts are telling us, but it seems possible that the unthinkable could happen.

[wesw]

trump will sweep the south

trump will nearly sweep the mid atlantic, he did not lose a single county in the "Acela primary"

I strongly suspect that trump will win new York, new jersey, rhode island , Massachusetts and new Hampshire, too

PA is his for the taking....

trump may well win florida.

his weakest part of the country will be the left coast and the western (cowboy) states, but I would NOT write off California just yet.

the original states will speak loudly once again.

trump wins

if he is shot, or the electoral college goes against the people....

...well, it won t be pretty. god help us all.

you had better beat him fair and square or accept defeat if he beats you.

otherwise the anarchists will win, because this country will explode

[MajGenl.Meade]

Not to worry LR. Whatever Trump does, Her Royal Clintone-ness has already won the election. Welcome, Madam President. Please keep Bill off the help.

[RayThom]

Let the Great Social Experiment begin.

[Bicycle Bill]

if he is shot, or the electoral college goes against the people....

...well, it won t be pretty. god help us all.

you had better beat him fair and square or accept defeat if he beats you.

otherwise the anarchists will win, because this country will explode

That sounds might effin' close to a threat of — if not an outright call for — civil war.  And if that ever happens, I'll put my money on the guys with the machine guns and the howitzers and the tanks and the airplanes and the smart bombs and the laser-guided weapons and all the training with them and everything else........  It would be over so quickly it would make the Arab-Israeli 'Seven-Day War' seem like the Hundred Years War by comparison.

After which, of course, you would crawl out of whichever rat hole you scurried into at the first sign of trouble and resume your blathering.

-"BB"-

[wesw]

oh bill...

you think that your remarks about rifles and bullets for trump are any better?

please, you hypocrite ....

I am only advocating that the govt be by the People, for the people...., and of the People.

I am only advocating that the People have the right to choose their leader.

do you disagree? do we not have that right as americans?

is your reading comprehension as poor as your understanding of your govt?

if the will, and the vote, of the people is defied by the "elite", revolution is exactly what I m calling for, and it is likely to come to pass

...on the other hand..., if Bernie gets more votes than Donald..., so be it, the People will have spoken and I will accept it.

you assume that the national guard, the police and the army will accept the subversion of the People s will?

don t be so sure.

you don t know me, don t make assumptions

[Lord Jim]

I'm sure there are other elections where a candidate made up the ground that Trump needs

Yes, but they didn't have the negative ratings baked into the cake the way Trump does...

But more to the point, I don't want Donald Trump to win the election...

I firmly believe he would be a complete disaster for this country as President, (on economics, international relations, national defense, take your pick...) and while I am a hardcore GOP partisan, I am also a patriotic American, and I don't want this unstable, narcissistic, embarrassing train wreck within 100 miles of the Oval Office...

I am hopeful that he will go down in flames, both in the best interest of my party, and in the best interest of my country....

And man, you gotta be some kinda awful for me to take that attitude when the alternative is Hillary Clinton...